Earth-Touch is an online portal that serves high-quality video clips, stills and information about wildlife, from beautiful locations around the world, through the medium of an online portal.
The idea is to serve video footage of wildlife quickly – wherever possible within a day of it being filmed, whether it’s lions in the Okavango Delta, Botswana, or giant otters in the vast Pantanal wetlands in Brazil. The project’s tagline is “Reallife. Now.”
Flow Communications has been contracted by Earth-Touchto develop and manage the editorial side of the project. A core team of people from Flow has been working on the site, which is currently in public beta, for over a year now.
Every day, we edit crew diaries coming in from the field and publish them and the videos together.
We also run the Earth-Touch blog, which contributes another dimension to the project. Various threads include “On the site” to promote the content being served on the portal, “Wildlife news from around the world”, “Field crew”(in which film crew members can reflect on anything from the ethics of filming wildlife to recounting amusing stories experienced while shooting the footage), “Did you know?” (snippets of interesting information about animal behaviour and biology), etc.
We have developed an extensive wiki for information on species, wild life events and destinations around the world as an in-house editorial resource, and have also developed a few “widgets” – multimedia modules which are meant to be more durable than the daily wash of wild life footage. We introduced the one on elephants to users in an online newsletter as follows:
Did you know that elephants can communicate for distances over a kilometre through infrasound, which is pitched too low for humans tohear? Or that elephant cows are pregnant for 22 months before giving birth to calves that are raised in mostly female herds? Or that thet runk is a tool for both breathing and smelling? Learn this and more in our interactive, multimedia widget on elephants, brought to you in October. Then take the widget quiz to see how much of an elephant expert you are!
At the moment, subscriptions to Earth-Touchare free, so sign up now by clicking the “sign up” link on the front page of the site. You’ll need a good internet connection and the latest Flash player (downloadable via a link on the site if you don’t have it) to make the most of this wonderful online experience.
